I haven't left any information here for some time, but there's something coming up rather soon that might interest some members.

On Saturday 20th January, at The Queen's College, Oxford, UK, at 12.30pm, there will be a portrait concert of LEONID NIKOLAYEV, featuring seven of his songs, plus his Fugue, Nocturne, Gavotte, Barcarolle and Sonata for solo piano. Performers will be Betty Makharinsky (soprano) and Jonathan Powell (piano). There will also be a few songs by Catoire and Rachmaninoff.

This concert offers a retrospective of Russian song and piano music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period referred to – particularly with reference to literature, but increasingly to music also – as the Silver Age of Russian culture. While the names of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and now Medtner are well-known to international audiences, many of their contemporaries’ works are still in relative obscurity, and this concert offers a rare opportunity to gain a broader appreciation of the music of this era known for its abundance of creativity. The poets whose verses these composers responded to include earlier Russian classics (Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev etc) as well as their own contemporaries (Blok, Balmont, Severyanin and Sologub). It will no doubt be an evening of first western performances: Taneyev and Glière, on the one hand, are known for their chamber and orchestral music, but their songs are all but unperformed in the west; Goldenweiser, Blumenfeld and Nikolayev, on the other hand, were legendary pianists but still not yet explored as composers. Makharinsky and Powell have recently recorded songs and piano music by Nikolayev, and this concert will feature several of these; their next project involves songs by Georgiy Conus who will be represented by songs and piano music.